


Vocation

by rannadylin



Series: Behold the Sun (Idalia) [5]
Category: Pillars of Eternity
Genre: Crisis of Faith, Gen, Siblings, orlans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:06:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22579051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rannadylin/pseuds/rannadylin
Summary: Idalia's life in Ixamitl, after her family's exodus from the Dyrwood/Readceras at the climax of the Saint's War, begins with her search for purpose. Is she still really a priest after Eothas took his light back from her - and after whatever must have happened to him, when her ring broke? Does she still *want* to be?
Series: Behold the Sun (Idalia) [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1506104
Comments: 7
Kudos: 6
Collections: TTRPG Godsquad





	Vocation

The chatter in the sitting room around Idalia fell not on deaf ears exactly, but on very preoccupied ones, which twitched gently with each stitch she painstakingly took. With all her focus on needle and thread and the fine linen cloth stretched tight in its hoop, she had gradually stopped paying attention to the family’s conversation. Ceri’s cheerful prattle and their aunt’s and grandmother’s occasional bemused questions and responses (much of it in Ixamitl, too, a language of which Dal still had much to learn) made a surprisingly comfortable background noise to the dilemma of the knot that had suddenly infected her thread and demanded all her concentration.

Until she heard a familiar name. Idalia’s ears instinctively oriented themselves to the sound, and she raised her eyes to her grandmother - Jacira, her mother’s mother, matron of the home that had taken in her prodigal daughter and grandchildren when they fled from the war in the west. (It still felt odd to call her _Grandmother_ , but Ceri and Cahal did; and Zyanya looked so _hopeful_ whenever her children were in the vicinity of her mother; so Dal tried, though never without a twinge of grief and longing for the old elf who had earned that title first.)

Ceri responded enthusiastically to the name Jacira had mentioned. “Oh, I didn’t even know there _was_ a temple of Eothas in Quetzalli! Is it near the others? I want to visit them all!”

“Really more of a chapel,” said Jacira. “Its priest is old and ailing, so the services there are irregular, but they do a lovely Spring Dawn one that your grandfather is very fond of.”

Ceri bounced in her seat a bit, reaching for Dal’s hand. Dal hastily anchored the needle in her sampler and moved it aside before her sister could haplessly stab herself upon it. She looked up as Ceri squeezed her hand in safety. “Dal is a priest of Eothas!” Ceri said with pride, as if the whole room didn’t already know as much about Idalia as Zyanya could tell them. “Aren’t you?”

“I was,” Dal admitted - or corrected. Ceri was squeezing tightly; the mended ring dug at her finger a bit.

“And you can do magic!” her sister prompted, with characteristic confidence despite having never seen Dal do any such thing.

“Well, a little,” Dal shrugged. “A bit of healing. Nothing as fancy as you or Mother can; it was never my specialty.” And how long had it been, she wondered, since the last time she worked a healing spell, or any such miracle? Certainly not since the night her ring had broken. Had they stayed in Readceras, they would have no doubt found use for those skills, but Quetzalli - or at least, the home of the Tlalli clan - was at peace.

“Hm,” said Jacira, eyes drifting down to Dal’s latest attempt at embroidery and back up to her granddaughters’ faces. “Specialty or no, few can claim as much. Perhaps you should see if the chapel has need of assistance, Idalia. I am sure many in Quetzalli who follow Eothas would welcome a more regular opportunity to worship than old Naloxili can provide.”

“Me?” Dal squeaked. “Oh, I...I don’t know. I was just one of many priests in Gilded Vale. I didn’t...well, that is, I was trained for most aspects of the priesthood, yes, but the ones I actually carried out regularly were not so...well, I’m sure I’ve only given two or three sermons in my life.” She finished in a near-whisper; her fur ruffled and eyes widened at the memory of those harrowing occasions.

“Ease comes with practice,” smiled Jacira with an intimidating encouragement. “Why don’t you go tomorrow and ask? In fact, you could deliver the spices Itzel has set aside for the chapel’s almsgiving,” she nodded toward her older daughter, Dal’s aunt, who sat watching the exchange with amusement as she worked her own embroidery with quick, practiced fingers, not just with thread but with beads of glass glinting as she secured them to the fabric in elaborate patterns.

“Yes, let’s!” Ceri chimed in. “I’ll go with you, Dal. I’d love to see this chapel!”

Dal hesitated, but even after such a short time in this family she knew there would be no talking Ceri out of it now. And she always had liked being involved in almsgiving. And…

And there was a limit to how long she could sit and make such a mess of this poor hoop of fabric, surrounded by near-strangers slowly becoming family. Perhaps Eothas wasn’t done with her yet?

She rubbed her thumb against the mended ring, no longer a conduit of his light. Well, at least there was the almsgiving; she could do that without shining. “I suppose we could,” she said.

* * *

They walked past the chapel twice. From the outside it was just another small house in a neighborhood that had seen better days, not a grand temple like the one in Gilded Vale or the other temples in Quetzalli - towering and imposing edifices to the glory of Hylea, Abydon, Berath, and others Dal barely knew. Eothas’ chapel sat amidst nearly identical houses, just as much in need of a fresh coat of paint or a few new roof tiles as its neighbors. Cahal, who had insisted on accompanying his sisters when Aunt Itzel’s directions emphasized that this street was safe enough to walk _in the daytime,_ stopped them suddenly to point out the sun-and-stars over the front door of a house they were about to walk past for the third time. 

Ceri looked disappointed. “This is a temple?”

“Chapel,” Cahal corrected. “She said to look for his symbol, and there it is. We going in or not?”

Dal looked away from the faint symbol of her god over the door and started when she realized her siblings were both looking to her to answer that. “Oh. Well...I suppose we should? It doesn’t seem to be anywhere else on the street.”

Ceri smiled and walked up to the door, raising her hand to knock. Then she frowned and turned back to her siblings. “ _Do_ we knock? Normally temples are just _open,_ you know, but this looks like just...a house?”

Dal and Cahal blinked. Cahal shrugged. Ceri knocked lightly, not fully committed to the idea. There was no answer. She tried the door: like any normal temple, open. 

They stepped into a room lit by dozens of candles, banishing shadow from every corner just as they did in Dal’s childhood. There was little else: some benches for the congregation, an altar where the candles crowded together in the greatest concentration, a statue behind it of Eothas crowned with light. It was not a particularly well-made statue, but the artist meant well, Dal thought. It looked nothing like Waidwen, to its credit, but also very little like the similar statues she remembered from Gilded Vale.

No other kith were in the chapel at present, so the three of them spread out, wandering around the tiny space for the brief time it took to see it all. They soon reconvened at the altar, where Dal stood staring at the flickering lights, remembering, not paying attention to Ceri’s ongoing commentary. A few minutes passed thus before a new voice called her attention back from its far country.

“Hello there! Can I help you?” The three of them looked up to see a middle-aged orlan woman, dressed in the Ixamitl style but without much of the ornamentation Dal was accustomed to see on her new family’s jackets and aprons and sleeves. 

“Hello!” Ceri returned, beaming at her. “Are you the priest here? I’m Ceri, this is Cahal and this is Dal; our aunt sent us with an almsgiving donation!”

“Peace to your souls,” the woman gave the traditional greeting with a calm smile and slight curtsey. “Not the priest, no. Naloxili isn’t well enough to see to the chapel’s upkeep, so I come in and clean. I’m Tlaca,” she said. “Almsgiving, you say? You actually want the inn, for that.”

“The inn?” Ceri prompted, eyes widening.

“Well, we used to organize almsgiving here, but it’s hardly the right sort of space for it. All we could really do was hand out pre-baked bread and sometimes a bit of fruit.” She dusted off her hands and grinned around at them. “Want to see the inn? Of course you do, if you’ve brought things for it. And I’m finished here for today, anyway.”

So they followed Tlaca through a door at the back of the chapel, through what looked like a priest’s study, also sparsely furnished but cluttered with books and papers and knick-knacks and a few more candles - here, unlit at the moment. Another door led them into a hallway, past other closed doors, and then out the back of the chapel-house into another small and crowded street. From this side, the houses of the neighborhood did not all look so much alike. Laundry dried from ropes linking balconies overhead, most of them looking like afterthoughts built onto upper floors in desperate need of more space wherever it could be found. Tables, chairs, wash basins and more crowded the balconies. Flowers in small pots brightened the occasional window. A cat, disturbed by their emergence into this alley, gave a brief, startled yowl and then leapt up to watch them from a nearby railing. Dal kept close to her sister and brother as Ceri plied their guide with questions.

“It’s been here longer than you might think,” Tlaca was saying. “Never been that big a call for Eothas in a port city like this, but enough that some traveling priest generations back bought the house and turned it into a chapel. Our flock’s grown a little as the neighborhood gets more crowded, though. Farmers who trusted Eothas for their crops in the fields outside city limits and kept on trusting him even when the lean years drove ’em here looking for other work.” She glanced up at the laundry lines across the narrow space between one row of houses and the next, skirts and shirts faded from once colorful dyes, fluttering in the breeze. “A little of his light still gets through, here. Where it’s most needed.”

She led them through another back door just like all the rest, and into what looked, indeed, like an inn of sorts. Tables and benches packed a small room lit only by daylight, through a window facing the alley, half concealed by a faded yellow curtain. One half of the far wall featured a door; the other half was a wall only slightly more than waist-high on an orlan, and a countertop ran along the top of that barrier. Beyond that...Dal blinked a few times, eyes adjusting in the dim light, and recognized a rudimentary kitchen. All was quiet, though: no busy cook at the fire or scrubbing dishes in the wash basin, no innkeeper to usher in guests, and indeed no guests here at the tables.

Cahal viewed the empty room with suspicion, positioning himself between Tlaca and his sisters. “Where is everyone?”

“Oh, the day’s just begun on this side,” Tlaca chuckled. “I can’t look after the chapel _and_ offer more than one nightly meal over here. Oh, the inn itself is on the street side of the house, dears. Here on the alley side - well, this is Sun’s Table.” At their blank expressions, she rolled her eyes and amended, “Pretentious sounding, I know. The locals have taken to calling it that, though, and you try stopping a thing like that once it takes its course. Anyway, here is where we do almsgiving now. It outgrew our little chapel. The inn on the other side of the building belongs to my sister. Berathite herself, but she tolerates my faith. I talked her into setting up this back room for a proper almsgiving, like they do in other cities - not just a breadbasket, but a full, hot meal. She didn’t care to share her kitchen with me - that’s why ours over there is so tiny; we just sectioned off a bit of the back room and set up shop. Minimal, but it’s functional.”

“Oh! You cook here?” Ceri asked, clapping her hands together.

“I do,” Tlaca nodded. “Those that can afford it pay for my sister’s cooking. I look after those as can’t. It’s better than nothing,” she shrugged, “even if it is plain fare. And totally dependent on what we’ve had donated from week to week. Speaking of which, you mentioned…?”

“Right!” Ceri gestured to Dal. “Dal’s got the parcels our aunt sent. Aunt Itzel trades in spices. I guess that’s...not the most practical thing for a place like this, but…”

“No, that’s very welcome,” Tlaca said, eyes wide as she opened the satchel that Dal now handed over. “Even those as haven’t any better options get tired of plain fare in time, and a bit of spices can go a _very_ long way. Stars, is that _cinnamon?”_

Dal nodded. “Cardamom, too. Coriander, peppercorns, a bit of dried chilis.”

“Bless your aunt,” murmured Tlaca. “That’ll go nicely. Very nicely, indeed.” She inclined her head toward the kitchen. “Well, come in and see it, if you like, while I get these put away and dream of what we’ll do with them.”

She lit a lantern dangling from a rafter just inside the kitchen door, and they crowded into a space tight even for one cook, let alone a cook with three tagalongs. But Tlaca bustled past them, back and forth, navigating the space with easy familiarity as she tucked the parcels of spices into whatever storage nooks suited her. Dal looked around in the flickering light of the lantern, still swinging where Tlaca had hoisted it, and took it all in with amazement. The kitchen back home - back in Gilded Vale - had not been all that large itself, especially when there were usually two or three priests on kitchen duty at a time, working long hours to see all the temple’s inhabitants fed, and even more so on Godandag when extra was prepared to be offered in almsgiving to the poor of the town. (Displaced farmers there, too, much the same as here. The sun alone was never enough to ensure bountiful crops.) But it was folk-sized, for one thing, and even a modest-sized kitchen in a temple the size of Gilded Vale’s seemed a luxury compared to this little corner of an inn’s back room. Still, she spotted all the essentials: fireplace fitted with cauldron and roasting racks, wash basin large enough to accommodate a few pans at once, a worktable spread with chopping boards and mixing bowls, and even a small brick oven.

Tlaca was muttering to herself, names of recipes Dal knew by heart and others that made her ears stand up in curiosity. After a moment Ceri and Cahal squeezed back out into the common room, but Dal lingered, running a finger over the copper pots and pans hung near the hearth, everything so familiar and yet so foreign in its arrangement here, like translating her Aedyran thoughts into Ixamitl to speak with her mother’s family: the same, but not the same at all. She looked up from her musings to see that Tlaca had finished stashing the spices and was eyeing her thoughtfully. Dal flushed and hurried through the door to rejoin her siblings. 

“Give your aunt my thanks,” Tlaca smiled, following her out into the common room.

“We will!” Ceri said. “Thank you for showing us around!”

“Come back anytime,” Tlaca said. “Chapel services every other Godandag, so long as Naloxili’s feeling up to it. And they’re third hour past dawn, not sunrise services like they do some places. Can’t keep him awake through the whole service any earlier,” she chuckled. “Any time of day’s fine for lighting a candle, though.”

She went back into the kitchen as Cahal and Ceri turned to go. Dal started to follow them, then looked back to see Tlaca already lighting the fire in the kitchen fireplace, ready to begin putting together the evening meal for those who would line the benches here in a few hours. So _many_ benches, and only one cook to provide for them.

“Dal?” Ceri called from the doorway. 

“Just a minute,” Dal said, and went back to the window-counter looking into the kitchen. “Tlaca?” she asked quietly, gripping the counter.

Tlaca looked up from the hearth, brushing a bit of ash from her hands as the fire caught at last. “Yes, dear?” 

“All of this...you do all of it by yourself? All the cooking here, and looking after the chapel too?”

Tlaca stared at her; Dal gripped the counter and counted two, three, of her own blinks before the woman replied. “I do. Most kith around here are busy with any work for hire they can find. Doesn’t leave them time for charity work. I’m one of the luckier ones; between my husband’s job and my sister’s inn, I’m looked after. Seems only right to look after those as don’t have that, in my turn.”

Dal nodded understanding. “But would you...want help? If I offered?” 

“Dal!” Ceri gasped. Cahal, already waiting out in the alley, slipped back in the doorway, watching with a scowl.

Dal glanced at their concerned, surprised expressions and offered a faint smile that she hoped was reassuring. Turning back to Tlaca, she loosened her grip on the counter just a bit. “I’m...looked after, too. So I can help.”

“Seriously?” Tlaca looked her over once more. “Kitchen’s barely big enough for one cook.” She tapped a finger to her chin. “Work’s big enough for two, though, and I’m already not here as often as I should be. You know your way around a kitchen, I suppose?”

Dal nodded: of that, at least, she was certain, even if she might need a moment to accustom herself to the unfamiliar layout of this one. “I may be a little out of practice,” she admitted. “Grandmother’s cook doesn’t particularly like me getting in her way, though Aunt Itzel shows me how to make Ixamitl recipes sometimes when the cook’s gone home for the night. Oh, and that’s also - most of what I know are Dyrwoodan recipes. I don’t think it would be any trouble to adapt them to whatever ingredients we can get here, though. Well, whatever’s donated.”

“Dyrwoodan,” Tlaca echoed. “That’s the accent, then. No wonder I couldn’t place it.” Dal nodded and she continued, “I wouldn’t mind seeing what you know. Sure you can handle cooking for a crowd, though?”

“Oh, easily,” Dal laughed, thinking again of dinnertime in Gilded Vale. 

“Dal,” Ceri called again, eyebrows tilted with her pout, “are you _sure?_ Grandmother thought you might help in the chapel, not the _kitchen…”_

Tlaca’s arched eyebrow demanded explanation, so Dal admitted, “I was a priest in the Dyrwood for...well, over a decade. I was raised in the temple. But...almsgiving and ministering to kith’s everyday needs,” she said, in the tone of one reciting lessons long ago learned, “are just as important as sermons and miracles. Maybe more. This is a part of the chapel too, Ceri. And...I’ve cooked for a crowd _many_ more times than I’ve given a sermon to one. I want to help here, if I may.”

Tlaca stopped trying to hide the smile that had been sneaking up on her. “Consider yourself hired, then. At least, we’ll give it a try. You free to start today?”

Dal nodded, slowly, thinking of the family - and the embroidery - waiting for her at home.

“Well, then,” Tlaca said, “we serve dinner at the eighteenth hour here. You can start with chopping the squash over there to roast.” She gestured at a bushel in one corner of the kitchen.

“Wait!” said Ceri, as Dal hurried back into the kitchen, already rolling up her sleeves, stiff with their embroidery. “You’re just staying here? Are you sure, Dal? What do we tell Mother?”

Dal blinked at her sister. “That I’m...where I need to be, I think. It’ll be nice to make myself useful.”

“But it’ll be dark by the time dinner’s over, and Aunt Itzel said…”

“Ceri,” Cahal interrupted, tugging at her arm before she could sail forward to talk Dal out of it. “Let her do it.”

“What?”

“I’ll be back to walk you home, Dal. Ceri’s right about that much.” His eyes narrowed. “ _You_ get to explain it all to Mother, though.”

Dal’s ears lowered; she hadn’t thought about the timing and the rough neighborhood, and Ceri _was_ right about that. But her siblings were already turning to go - Ceri still looking a bit reluctant, but putting up no further argument. So Dal said only, “Thank you.” And, “I’ll see you tonight.”

And then - squash.


End file.
